Retail media is having a moment. And if you work anywhere near commerce or media, you’ve probably felt it for a while now. With eMarketer projecting that omnichannel retail media ad spending will rise 17.9% to $69.33 billion in 2026, the category has firmly established itself as one of the fastest-growing channels in advertising. Trade publications cover it constantly, conference agendas are packed with sessions about it, and retailers of every size are under pressure to have a clear point of view on it.
And yet, in my experience, there’s still a real struggle to clearly explain what retail media actually is, how its pieces fit together, or whether investments are working. That gap between excitement and clarity is worth talking about honestly; because it’s where budgets and opportunities can quietly slip away.
I came to this category recently, stepping into my first dedicated retail media role after more than a decade in broader retail marketing technology, working with brands like Nike, CVS Health, and Best Buy through my time at companies like Lexer, Cordial, and Monetate. I arrived with a lot of curiosity and a healthy skepticism toward industry jargon, which turned out to be surprisingly useful.
A Fresh Set of Eyes on a Crowded Category
What I’ve found is that retail media is both genuinely powerful and genuinely confusing. And most of the confusion isn’t because retailers made bad choices; it’s because the space grew really fast. Most retailers are running 15 to 20 tools stitched together that were never designed to work as a whole. That’s not a failure of vision. It’s just the reality of what happens when a category scales that quickly.
At its core, retail media is advertising powered by a retailer’s first-party shopper data. That can run onsite— on the retailer’s website, app, in-store screens, or email— or offsite, using that same data to reach shoppers across the open web, social platforms, and connected TV. The common thread is the data: a retailer has customers, those customers generate behavioral signals through shopping, and brands want access to those signals to show up closer to the point of purchase. Amazon figured this out first and built a multi-billion dollar business around it. Everyone else has spent the last several years trying to catch up, which is a big part of why the landscape feels so fragmented.
The Technology Problem Nobody Talks About Clearly
The complexity that tends to trip retailers up most often isn’t strategic, it’s operational. Managing a retail media network means coordinating across ad serving, data clean rooms, measurement providers, demand-side platforms, and more. The result is a lot of manual work, inconsistent reporting, and an inability to see the full picture of what’s actually happening.
This is where some technology vendors haven’t done retailers any favors. There’s been a lot of pitch language bandied about that leads with hyperbole and analogy instead of actual use cases and proof points. ‘Our AI-powered optimization engine delivers unprecedented ROAS’ sounds impressive until you ask what the methodology is and realize there’s no clean answer.
What Good Measurement Actually Looks Like
Measurement is the other place where the conversation tends to break down, and it’s worth slowing down here because this is where many teams struggle most. Retail media measurement is genuinely fragmented; different networks use different attribution windows, methodologies, and definitions of what counts as a conversion. What gets sold as robust measurement and what actually constitutes robust measurement don’t always line up.
The right questions to ask are whether the measurement is incremental, whether it’s been independently verified, and whether it reflects the metrics your organization actually cares about.
The Questions Worth Asking Before You Scale
Truly understanding retail media requires a clear framework and the willingness to ask straightforward questions before committing budget.
What does success look like for this investment, and how will we know if we achieved it? What does our current tech stack actually enable and where are the gaps? Who owns the measurement methodology, and what are its limitations?
These aren’t complicated questions, but consistently asking them is what separates retailers making meaningful progress from those who are simply adding to the stack.
The Customer at the Center
Here’s the thing that gets lost in all the talk about data and attribution and stack consolidation: the $69 billion in projected retail media spend exists because real people are shopping. That first-party data isn’t just an asset to monetize, it’s a signal of trust. Shoppers gave you their attention, their time, and their purchase behavior because they came to you for something.
Retail media only works, sustainably and at scale, if the shopping experience gets better, not worse. The retailers I admire most in this space are the ones who hold that tension honestly. Yes, they’re building media businesses, but they’re doing it in a way that makes their customers feel seen rather than targeted. That’s not just a values argument. It’s a business one.
Retail media is going to keep growing, and the pressure on retailers to operate it well is only going to increase. The good news is that clarity doesn’t require mastering every technical nuance of a rapidly evolving landscape. It starts with asking better questions and being willing to act on the answers, even when they push back on assumptions you’ve already made.
Abby Borden is Vice President of Marketing at Vantage, a retail media orchestration platform. She brings more than a decade of experience in marketing technology and go-to-market strategy, having built and led marketing functions at high-growth companies, including Lexer and Cordial, before stepping into her first dedicated retail media role at Vantage.
